Along with the memory theaters
of the renaissance, Swann's Way is inspired by the Marcel Proust novel by the same title.
I live just south of the fictional Combray in the small French
village of Lavardin. As I read Proust's rememberance of a France
at once so similar yet so different from the France which I had
come to love, I became increasingly interested in how human character
is influenced by the character of the landscape, the very three-dimensional
space in which we move. I am not exactly the same person here
in my snug cave in France that I am in sunny Florida. I am not
the same person when I head up the cliff for a dreamy wander
that I am when I head down the hill to my car and the workday
world. There is a spacial character to the mind and we keep bits
of our souls "far apart from each other and unaware of each
other's existance, in airtight compartments of seperate afternoon's..."

The reliquary, Swann's
Way holds inside 21 cards in two side compartments and a
mounted compass in the center compartment. Each card has a photo
and short caption. Each photo is from a single walk on a single
day in February 2001 outside the artist's home in Lavardin, France.
The set is numbered to retain the temporal and spacial order
of the walk along the artist's own personal Swann's Way.

If, when
I walk out my front door, I turn left and climb the steep dirt
path up to the plain above instead of going straight down the
paved sidewalk to the village and my car, I find myself on Swann's
Way. Which direction leads to Swann's Way when you walk out your
door?